10 Keys to Ecommerce Success

Lets start with dispelling the greatest myth surrounding Ecommerce. Having an online store is no guarantee of sales. If you want online shoppers to buy from you, you need to have not just great products you need people to be able to find you and to make your store a place where people will want to come to you store and shop, again and again.

Here are ten keys to boost and grow your online revenue

Key 1

Your Ecommerce site should feel credible and trustworthy.

Make sure to have an SSL certificate and serve up your pages via https, For an Ecommerce site this is absolutely critical. Google will be unlikely to rank transaction-oriented sites that do not secure the transmission of private or financial information. More importantly your customers will be less likely to trust you or the safety of their credit card information.

Key 2

Easy Navigation

What is the fastest way to lose a potential customer? Make it difficult for her to find what she’s looking for. Therefore it’s critical that Ecommerce businesses make products easy to find, by having clear top-level navigation (menus) with product categories clearly labeled and pop out subcategories.

Key 3

Imagery and Descriptions

People are very visual and will often form an opinion about your business and/or products within seconds of seeing your site. If you want to give people a good first impression and improve your conversions you need to have great imagery using high quality, professional photos. Customers want real pictures of your actual product. If you’re selling someone else’s products it’s worth it to take your own pictures and add something different to them that helps you stand out from the competition.

Key 4

Customer Reviews

Customers trust fellow customers much more than they trust retailers or brands trying to sell them something, Having product reviews drives traffic and conversion by up to 44%. Shoppers want unbiased and informative reviews from fellow shoppers to help drive their purchase decisions. Make sure those star ratings snippets are on your category pages, and above the fold on product detail pages to help drive visibility.

Key 5

Customer Service

When you launch an Ecommerce site, you immediately have a 24×7 global business, and your customers will require pre-sale and post-sale customer service from you. The critical success factors are setting and managing the expectations for the availability and speed of your responses and being prepared to track, manage and respond to all inquiries in a timely fashion.

Key 6

Checkout should be Fast and Easy

The more steps it takes for customers to pay, the greater the chance they’ll drop out. Your site should offer a range of solutions to help speed up payments, from one-page checkouts to recurring purchases and the ability to save card details.

Key 7

SEO/PPC

SEO is the process of organically improving the rankings of your website in search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search engines look at a very wide range of constantly evolving factors when deciding which websites to rank. PPC is Pay Per Click advertising where programs like Google Ad Words, Bing Ads, Ad Roll, Steel House, and others, offer ways for merchants to promote their websites quickly and obtain a wealth of data that can be used to make campaigns more cost effective at generating sales.

Key 8

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful channel for nearly every Ecommerce business. Whereas most channels—like SEO and social media—are volatile and subject to change, the email list you build over time will become a pillar of your business that continues to drive both new and repeat visitors to the products in your store.

Key 9

Paid Social

With all the major Social Media networks constantly decreasing your organic reach Paid Social is a low cost way of reaching out to targeted consumers. Similar to PPC this means paying to display adverts (whatever the format – text, image, video, carousel etc.) or sponsored messages to social network users based on user profile e.g. demographic. A cost is incurred depending on the type of ad planned; for example many ads incur a cost per click.

Key 10

Abandoned Cart Email Strategy

Cart abandonment is a fact of life in any Ecommerce operation with the current average rate of abandonment running at around 70%. However it is not all doom and gloom, a carefully planned abandoned Cart Email Strategy can convince customers to return and purchase.

We hope that this has been of some help, if you would like to discuss any of the above email us on info@ecommgarage.com or call 07957846725 to have a chat

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10 Keys to Ecommerce Success September 28th, 2017Shak

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